Axis of War: The First of August (2007)
The year is 1927 and the Alliance moves triumphantly from victory to victory in an epic and bloody civil war campaign against the uprisings of brutal warlords and feudal barons that has left the country on the brink of total collapse. With the nation's fate hanging in the balance, a rebel revolt in the stronghold city of Nanchang threatens to give the insurgents the upper hand and as the first day of August dawns the Alliance, led by some of the bravest soldiers and greatest tacticians the world has ever seen, face their deadliest and most monumental battle yet.
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Pretty Good
In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.
This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.
The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
This film is set in 1927 and is mostly about the final split between the Communists and Kuomintang, who had been allied for several years against the older sort of warlord. It begins and ends with battle scenes, but is mostly about the politics and conspiracy between times.The film fails to give the context, which non-Chinese viewers would be unlikely to know. That China's 1911 revolution had led to chaos and warlordism. That Sun Yatsen had formed an alliance with the Soviet Union and with China's small Communist Party. That the Northern Expedition, starting from the Kuomintang's southern base, was aimed at suppressing the warlords and also the rival national government in Beijing. That by 1927, Sun Yatsen was dead and Chiang Kai-Shek had rejected the Communist alliance and also failed to do anything about foreign control of the core of Shanghai and many other Chinese cities. A couple of minutes explaining this would have made the rest of the film a lot clearer.I was also surprised that Sun Yatsen's widow wasn't shown. She played an important role as leader of those non-Communists who wanted to continue the alliance.